Courtroom Notebook

The Menendez Murder Trial

As the prosecution rests, the author reports on one of the year’s ugliest and most discussed trials. Lyle and Erik Menendez stand accused of the cold-blooded murder of their parents—a crime Dunne investigated for Vanity Fair in 1990—and though the brothers have confessed, they are fighting back with a shocking charge: that their Hollywood-executive father sexually abused them.

Three years ago, shortly after Lyle and Erik Menendez were arrested in Los Angeles for the murder of their parents, I wrote about the case in Vanity Fair. I had followed the story from the day of the murders, and I had not really been shocked to read seven months later that the sons had been arrested. Despite a lot of talk that it had been a Mafia hit, people who know about such things had told me that the Mob would never have done such a messy job. One shot to the back of Hollywood executive Jose Menendez’s head would have been sufficient. And then out the door. No hit man would have been so fastidious as to stop and pick up the shell casings. And the Mafia would never have killed the wife. Jose Menendez had 6 wounds, inflicted by a 12-guage shotgun, and Kitty Menendez had 10. The ironically named family room, where the massacre took place as the couple sat watching television and eating bowls of vanilla ice cream and strawberries, was covered with blood, guts, body pieces, and what they call “matter.”

The thought that it might have been the sons first occurred to me when I saw television coverage of the memorial service for Jose and Kitty Menendez at the Directors Guild on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. That location was the idea of the famed publicist Warren Cowan, who had been hired by Live Entertainment, Jose Menendez’s company, to dispel whispers that he had had Mafia connections and to make him look like an accepted member of the film community. There was a second memorial service a few days later in Princeton, New Jersey, where the family had once lived. Lyle and Erik spoke very movingly. Lyle read a letter his father had once written him, filled with love and pride in his son. It was when they were walking outside after the first service, receiving condolences, that the thought came to me. I wonder, I said to myself.

In my article I suggested that at their trial sexual molestation might be introduced by the defense as a way of returning the Menendez brothers to their mansion, their private tennis court, their private swimming pool, their fancy cars, and their fancy chess sets. A friend of the boy’s, with whom Lyle had played chess until two o’clock in the morning the night before his arrest, told me at dinner a short time later, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg.” Another friend who was present said, “The tapes will show that Jose molested Lyle at a very young age.” I thought that was ridiculous, and wondered whether or not I should even mention it, but I did. Friends of the boys’ and people close to the family called the notion absurd.

Also in that article was the only print interview ever given by Judalon Smyth, whom Diane Sawyer interviewed for television on PrimeTime Live. Smyth said that at the time of the murders she was the mistress of Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, the Beverly Hills psychologist to whom Erik Menendez later confessed. According to Smyth, at the behest of Dr. Oziel—a behest he denies—she listened to the confession outside the door of the therapist’s inner office. Later, after breaking off with the doctor, who she claimed had played mind games with her and dispensed drugs to her, which he was not licensed to do; Smyth went to the Beverly Hills police and told everything she knew. She provided the police with all the information they needed to arrest the brothers. She knew that the shotguns had been purchased in San Diego. She knew about the false ID that had been used to buy the guns. She knew that Oziel had made tapes of his recollection of Erik’s and Lyle’s confessions on October 31 and November 2, 1989, as well as a tape of a session with them on December 11. In this odd case, one of the greatest oddities is that Judalon Smyth, who was responsible for getting the boys arrested, is scheduled to be a witness for the defense. And Dr. Oziel, who at first attempted to conceal the incriminating tapes, is the main witness for the prosecution.

After my article appeared in the October 1990 issue, Dr. Oziel hired a public-relations firm and, with his wife by his side, held a press conference in the Beverly Hilton Hotel at which he denied all of Smyth’s allegations and announced that he was suing me and this magazine.

In July of this year, the Supreme Court of the State of California ruled that the tapes of the boys’ confessions that they had killed their parents would be admissible as evidence, although the tape of Oziel’s session with the brothers would remain inadmissible. Once that ruling was finally made, the boys could no longer plead innocent. They had confessed and given details, and notes on their confessions were on tape. A little more than a week before the start of the trial on July 20, the defense, conceding that the boys had killed their parents, said it would prove they had killed their parents in self-defense, because they were in fear for their lives after years of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse.

The prosecution is seeking to prove that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed for the $14 million estate which they stood to inherit. Pamela Bozanich, the chief prosecutor, said, “This is not a prosecution trial. This is a defense trial. The defense has conceded all the prosecution charges. They have to prove that the boys were in immense danger from their parents. And they have to prove sexual molestation.” The state is seeking the death penalty.

In Judge Stanley M. Weisberg’s courtroom in the Van Nuys Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, it is as if we are participating in a long mini-series, in which Leslie Abramson, the defense attorney for Erik, the younger of the two confessed killers, is defining for all future actresses how the role of the tough lady defense attorney should be played. Her scene-stealing performance, which at times infuriates Judge Weisberg, as it infuriates the prosecution, has all eyes focused on her every moment. And that’s exactly where she wants all eyes to be. There is never an instant when she is not performing. And she knows how to play to the Court TV camera as well as Barbra Streisand knows how to play to a movie camera.

Considering the occupation of Jose Menendez and the town where the crimes took place, it is hard not to think of this case and this trial in terms of show business. It is the talk of the town, because it’s the best show in town. People begin lining up at four in the morning to be sure they get in—the way they do for Academy Awards night. Only 10 members of the media have permanent seats in the courtroom, and I am one of them. I wouldn’t miss this show for a million bucks. But, in the parlance of the industry, as people out here call the film business, the big guns who have dinner at Mortons on Monday nights, dinner at Spago on Friday nights, dinner at Chasen’s or Traders on Sunday nights, and dinner at Orso or Locanda Veneta all the other nights will tell you that this is not big-screen material. This is TV fare.

The two defendants, 18 and 21 when they killed their parents, 21 and 25 today, had a sort of glamour at the time of their arrests, just over three years ago. Now gray prison pallor has replaced their golden tans. The face of Erik, the once great tennis player, who “might have been a world-class player,” according to the testimony of his former $60,000-a-year-coach, has become skeletal. Their Armani-type clothes have been replaced in the courtroom by sensible shirts, slacks, and sweaters, brought freshly washed and ironed each morning for them to change into from the L.A. County Jail uniforms they are wearing when they arrive at court. Their rich-boy swaggers, struts, and smirks have been erased. They now are scowling, gloomy, glum. They are, after all, fighting for their lives. They seldom speak to each other. Joan Newcome, a court spectator, who is among the group that arrives each day at four in the morning, said to me in the corridor one day about Lyle, “I have never looked on a face that was so devoid of feeling. It’s as if he were dead inside.”

Each brother has his own defense team and his own jury. There is a sense of central casting about the people in the courtroom. Lady lawyers abound. Working with Leslie Abramson on Erik’s defense is Marcia Morrissey. Jill Lansing, who heads Lyle’s team, works with Michael Burt of San Francisco. The prosecutor is Pamela Bozanich, and her partner is Lester Kuriyama, who is Japanese-American. All are young, or reasonably so. All are good-looking. There is not a bum lawyer in the bunch. Although Leslie Abramson dominates the courtroom, each has big scenes to play, and so far they have all played them well. Several of the cross-examinations led by Jill Lansing and Michael Burt have been stunning; both are quiet, controlled—totally the opposite of Abramson.

The Beverly Hills police who have testified for the prosecution have all been tall, lean, handsome, with mustaches. Very different from New York cops—not one fatty on the force. The best friend of Erik and the two best friends of Lyle who have testified are also tall, lean, and handsome. Not surprisingly, even the bailiffs are blond, tanned California boys and girls grown up. The computer expert whom Lyle hired shortly after the murders to erase the hard disk on the family computer, on which the boys feared there was a will in which they might have been disinherited, and whom Lyle later referred to as some “little Jewish guy,” duly took the stand wearing a yarmulke, and said that the whole experience of being in the house on North Elm Drive “made my skin crawl.” The coroner, who is a tall Peter Lorre type, showed the grisliest death photographs I have ever seen at a murder trial. And then there is Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, the chief witness for the prosecution, the therapist to whom Erik Menendez said, while leaning against a parking meter on Bedford Drive outside the doctor’s office, “We did it.” Well, we’ll get to Dr. Oziel.

It has been 13 years since I lived in Los Angeles, in Beverly Hills, actually, in the 700 block, not too many streets away from 722 North Elm Drive, the scene of the bloody parricide. Jose Menendez, the deceased father, was chief executive officer of Live Entertainment, a video-distribution company that is a partially owned subsidiary of Carolco Pictures, a movie-production company. He was highly regarded by both his company and parent company. He was also deeply despised by nearly everyone who worked for him. One of his former colleagues told me that at the time of the murder, there was speculation at Live that any one of several executives there had reason to commit them. Jose Menendez loved to humiliate people in meetings, in front of their co-workers. He loved to fire people. He loved to threaten to deprive people of their Christmas bonuses a few days before Christmas. His own bonus the year he was blown away by his sons would have been $850,000, on top of his immense salary.

The Menendez house is almost a metaphor for the family that lived in it. The house is never not described in newspaper accounts as a $4 million mansion. And it was. But don’t be fooled by the price. It looked fine from the outside. Inside, it was a disaster, not unlike the Menendez family itself, as fake as the dozens of family photographs of the four of them, smiling and happy together. It did not have the good-bad taste to be called vulgar, which would have been acceptable. It was just tacky—cheaply furnished, looking like a rented house. Shortly after the boys were put in jail, I went through it room by room, flushing toilets, turning on taps, pretending I was a rich guy from New York and a potential buyer. I was in cahoots with a Beverly Hills real-estate broker, who, at a signal from me, engaged the person representing the family in talking price while I investigated the family room.

At the outset, I must admit to a prejudice. I feel not an ounce of sympathy for these two young killers, even though I acknowledge that they lived a miserable life with a pitiful mother and a detestable father. I happen to believe in the alternative solution of moving out, but that way of course, you risk not getting the money, and these kids liked money. In the weeks directly following the brutal killings, before they were suspects, they spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $700,000 on new cars, Rolex watches, clothes—stuff like that. In addition, they left a deposit on a $990,000 penthouse, which they later decided not to buy. To me, they were cold, calculating sociopaths, a word that the defense has been successful in having ruled as inadmissible for the two juries to hear in Oziel’s testimony. This was not murder in the heat of passion; this was carefully planned. In addition, their father may or may not have been a child molester, depending on whether or not you go along with the defense strategy that was introduced only 10 days before the start of the trial, three years after the boys were arrested. “This, after all, was a man, you will hear, who pulled Erik’s hair when forcing this 11-year-old to orally copulate him; who slapped him repeatedly when the child cried after his father ejaculated in his mouth for the first time; who forcibly sodomized him,” said Leslie Abramson in her opening statement. Business acquaintances of Jose’s with whom I spoke tend to scoff at the stories of him sexually abusing his sons. He was an extremely macho man, known to have had a mistress for eight years and a string of disposable girlfriends. Fidelity to his marriage vows was not his strong suit. “Jose would fuck an umbrella,” one business acquaintance told me.

Intrigued? Find more of Dominick Dunne’s coverage of the Menendez brothers here.

In restaurants and at parties all over this town, the only topic that is being discussed as much as or more than the Menendez trial is what is being referred to in show-business circles as “the Heidi Chronicles,” which has no relationship whatsoever to Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play of the same name. The Heidi referred to here is Heidi Fleiss, the daughter of a prominent L.A. pediatrician, who is charged with being the newest, youngest, prettiest Hollywood madam to the stars. She was busted in June, and turned over her little black book to the authorities. The book is said to contain the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of some very big names in the entertainment industry, as well as some of the customers’ “specialties.” Although the newspapers refer to them as “unnamed studio executives,” everyone here knows who they are, and everyone is insatiable for the latest details. Everyone now knows, for instance, that one prominent fellow in the industry enjoys defecating on the $1,500-an-hour girls, and wears plastic baggies on his feet so he won’t step in his messes. A big studio is said to be involved, and it is predicted that heads will soon roll there. Out here, nothing shocks. Everything is accepted. When I evinced surprise at the mention of a certain member of the group, who has been long married, I was told matter-of-factly across a dinner table in Beverly Hills that his wife liked hair pie.

In what can only be described as overkill, the defense, in the old blame-the-victim strategy, has gone to the greatest lengths to assassinate the character of Kitty Menendez, a deeply unhappy woman heartbroken by her husband’s infidelity. Having pumped her full of lead, her sons now participate in killing her again as they listen calmly to their lawyers’ and cousins’ description of her as a desperate, demented, drunken, drugged, suicidal woman who harassed her husband’s mistress and was also a dangerous driver and a lousy housekeeper. According to the defense, there were always dog feces on the floor, and ferret feces, dropped by the family’s pet ferret under the bed in Mom and Dad’s room, where Lyle was sent to lie when he was bad. There was also a rabbit—Lyle’s rabbit—but the parents didn’t like the rabbit and wanted Lyle to get rid of it. One morning he found it dead in the garbage can. Either Mom or Dad, or both, had bashed its head in because Lyle hadn’t gotten rid of it, as they had ordered him to.

We have been told in court that Lyle at 14 was still wetting his bed, and that his parents would put the soaking, smelly sheets on the breakfast table. We have been told that Kitty threatened to poison her family, that she told her sons she hated them, that she could have had a career in broadcasting if she hadn’t had them. The defense claims that she knew all along that her husband was molesting Erik. “You will hear evidence that she never tended to her son while he was throwing up in the bathroom next door to her bedroom after a sexual episode with his father.… You will also hear evidence that up to the age of 15 Erik’s mother would periodically make her son submit to her physical inspections of his genitals, which she called ‘checking you out.’ ” On and on. We have also heard that in a fit of rage with Lyle a week before the killings she reached over and pulled off the 21-year-old’s hairpiece. Leslie Abramson would have us believe that until that moment Erik never knew that his brother and protector wore a toupee.

I have always thought that the toupee hadn’t been made that I couldn’t detect. But the masterpiece of wigmaking that is affixed to the top of Lyle Menendez’s youthful head fooled me completely back in 1990, when I first saw him, at some of the early hearings shortly after the arrests. Because he is so young, it never occurred to anyone, not even the police, that he wore one. A Beverly Hills detective with whom I have kept in touch told me several years ago that it had been discovered in the Los Angeles County Jail when a fellow prisoner slapped Lyle on the head in the shower and his hair flew off. Toupees are not allowed in prison, because prisoners have been known to hide their stash of drugs under them. Even Michael Milken had to dispense with his during his period of incarceration. Once Lyle’s was detected he was allowed to wear it only for court appearances. Before one such appearance, other prisoners hid it from him, and he had to go into the courtroom without it. It was said at the time that he had shaved his head.

Family secrets are clearly going to play a big part in the defense strategy. According to Abramson, the exposure of the wig freed Erik to tell his brother what their father had been doing to him. This, in turn, led Lyle to come to his brother’s aid by confronting their father and telling him to stop molesting Erik. Jose Menendez allegedly replied, “He is my son, and I will do what I want with him.”

During the lunch break a few days later, I was all alone in the corridor outside the courtroom, going over my notes. A young man came up and introduced himself as Craig Cignarelli. Of course I knew who he was. He had been Erik Menendez’s best friend. Three years ago, I had tried to interview him, without success. His family had sent him out of town to avoid the publicity. Now I asked the young man, who was due to testify as a prosecution witness the next day, to sit down and talk. He accepted, but said he would not answer any questions about the case. He told me that he and his father were not on speaking terms. He said that he was still at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and that students there had been quite kind to him when they found that he was a friend of one of the notorious Menendez brothers and would testify at their trial. We chatted for a while. Then people began coming back from lunch. Later, during an afternoon break, I encountered him again in the corridor. “May I ask you one question? It’s not about the case.” He said, “Ask it. I’m not sure I’ll answer.” I said, “Did you know that Lyle Menendez wore a rug?” He smiled. “Yes,” said Erik’s former best friend.

With the Menendez brothers, best friends came and went, usually following betrayals. For the most part, the “best friends” of theirs who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution seemed to be a pretty shabby bunch. Lyle’s friends from Princeton, Donovan Goodreau, whose stolen driver’s license Erik used to buy the Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns, and Glenn Stevens, who was in the car with Lyle when he was arrested, came off as liars. Stevens also came off as a user of his rich friend, in it for the money. At the time of the arrest, he was wearing one of Lyle’s two Rolex watches, which he later sold to a jeweler friend of his father’s and kept the money. He also admitted to pilfering from the cash register of a restaurant Lyle had purchased in Princeton with his brand-new wealth. In a devastating cross-examination by Jill Lansing, Lyle’s attorney, who never lost her Grace Kelly elegance as she zeroed in on him for his betrayals of his former friend, Stevens remarked, “Friendship transcends a lot of things, but homicide is not one of them.” It was his single sympathetic line, but it didn’t seem consonant with anything else he said. It sounded rehearsed, as if some advisor had said to him, “Fit this in somewhere.”

Watching Erik and Lyle Menendez look at their former best friends, with their good suits and semi-promising lives, I wonder if they ever think, Was the rampage worth it?

The hotel to be at these days is the Chateau Marmont, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It has been done over but not done up, and has returned to its glory days in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Garbo slept here. Bette Davis slept here. So did many other luminaries of those decades. Eleven years ago, however, John Belushi cooled here, and everyone jumped ship. The place went into decline. Now there are models and musicians in the elevators again, and literary gatherings sponsored by Buzz, the L.A. magazine, where authors read from their works in the vast lobby, which looks like something out of an Italian palazzo. I have read there, and Jeffrey Archer has, and Gita Mehta, and today a few hundred of Sandra Bernhard’s friends are coming to hear her read from her new book, Love, Love, and Love. She has been supplied with a bouncer to keep out the wrong crowd. And, for old times’ sake, there was fight down the hall at 4:30 this morning. “Open up! I know my sister’s in there!” someone yelled, and a noisy scene ensued. After all, no one wants the place to get too proper.

There is not a single sympathetic character in the Menendez story. There is no one to root for. This is as lousy a bunch of human beings as you could find. They are not from the lower depths, outcasts of society. These people did not want for anything. They were rich people, nouveau riche people, a miserably unhappy family, all living together in a house of hate. Lyle Menendez always wanted a Porsche, but his father would give him only an Alfa Romeo, which Lyle told one of his friends at Princeton was “a piece of shit.” He did get his Porsche, however, soon after he killed his father.

We know that both brothers are expert liars. Erik won a prize as best actor at Beverly Hills High, the locale of the hit TV series Beverly Hills, 90210, and briefly considered becoming an actor. Remember their moving eulogies and their 911 telephone call to the police, saying they had come home from the movies and found their parents dead? By now that tape has been played on radio and television hundreds of times. There could not have been a better performance of grief and hysteria. It fooled a lot of people for a long time. Later that night, they were questioned by Sergeant Thomas W. Edmonds, a 32-year veteran of the Beverly Hills police department, who found them so credible that he didn’t even ask them to submit to the test routinely carried out in shotgun murders, to see if their hands carried shotgun-blast residue. As they talked that night, they suggested that the Mafia might have been involved. And a few days later, when Lyle hired bodyguards to protect him, he was so convincing when he said that he was afraid he and his brother might be killed by the same people who had killed their parents that the bodyguards—for the first time in their careers—wore bulletproof vests. We have been told that a relation of the boys’ who will testify for the defense will tell the jury that Jose Menendez’s credo for success was “Cheat, steal, lie, but win.” And his sons took his advice, at least partly. They cheated. They stole. And they lied. Oh, boy, did they lie. But they did not win. To the bitter end, they failed to meet their father’s expectations of them.

The latest restaurant to find favor with the industry moguls is the very small Locanda Veneta, “on third, across from Cedars,” which is crammed full every night. Lots of famous folk were squeezed together the night I was there. Dawn Steel, the film producer, who was once the head of Columbia Pictures, introduced me to Michael Eisner, the $60-million-a-year C.E.O. of Disney. Eisner shakes hands without looking at the person he is being introduced to.

The very expensive Menendez defense is being paid for with money from the $14 million estate of the parents the brothers killed. From the beginning, it was the immediate response of everyone in the family, including all the potential contingent heirs and executors, that estate assets be used to pay for the trial of Lyle and Erik.

A sad figure in the story is Maria Menendez, the 75-year-old grandmother of Lyle and Erik and the mother of the slain Jose. One day I watched her drive up alone to the courthouse in a beat-up old beige car, looking for a place to park. Apparently Jose’s largesse in the car department (the courtyard of the house on North Elm was filled with expensive family cars when he was alive) did not extend to his mother. There is something noble about old Mrs. Menendez. For several years after the slayings, she steadfastly maintained that her grandsons, whom she refers to as “the boys,” were innocent, and nothing could dissuade her from that belief. People said that even if she had seen a videotape of her grandsons murdering her son she would have said that the tape was rigged. Even with the admissibility of Erik’s confession to Oziel that he and Lyle killed their parents, Maria Menendez, according to a close friend, clings to the belief that the Mafia murdered her son and got rid of the shotguns, which have never been recovered. Now, flanked by her daughters, she has to listen to defense lawyers depict her successful and powerful son as a child molester, committing incest with her grandsons.

Leslie Abramson, in her opening statement to Erik’s jury, conceded that Erik had indeed confessed to the killings in a tentative fashion to Craig Cignarelli and later to the psychologist Dr. L. Jerome Oziel. But, she stressed, “he did not tell them the true motivation for the killings. To do that, he would have had to reveal the shameful, in his opinion, secrets that he had spent most of his life concealing.… For 12 years, between the ages of 6 and 18, my client, Erik Menendez, was sexually molested by his father.” The most recent molestation, she said, had taken place only one week before the homicides. Abramson claimed that the pattern of molestation had started out as inappropriate touching and arousal of Erik and had “escalated in a carefully calculated pattern of grooming the child for his father’s sexual gratification. This pattern included repeated acts of forcible oral copulation, sodomy, rape, and the intentional infliction of pain by the use of foreign objects upon Erik’s person. Jose Menendez’s obvious purpose was to use his child’s body to satisfy his lust.”

These sexual allegations have yet to be proved by the defense, but the litany of Jose Menendez’s deviation, as described by Abramson, was shocking in the extreme, and must have been devastating for Maria Menendez and her daughters to have to listen to. The following morning I described this moment on the television show Good Morning America. My exact words were: “I sat directly behind Maria Menendez, who is the grandmother of the two boys, who was the mother of Jose, and she and her two daughters, the aunts of the two boys and the sisters of Jose. Nothing happened on their faces as they heard these extraordinary charges of oral and anal sex.” In fact, the women were behaving in the accepted courtroom manner of showing no emotion. Crying, crying out, or any other outward display of emotion can get a family member removed from the courtroom, as being prejudicial to the jury.

Later in the courtroom, one of Maria’s daughters, Marta Menendez Cano, a stockbroker in West Palm Beach, who is said to resemble her late brother physically, became furious with me. With her eyes flashing and her face contorted with rage, she turned around to glare at me as she copied down my name from my nametag. At the next break, she called an informal press conference and attacked me, saying that she and her sister had trouble holding back tears and that her mother had been in a near-fetal position. Mrs. Menendez was not in a near-fetal position, nor did I see any evidence that the sisters were holding back tears.

Marta Cano took my statement of their demeanor as a criticism of the family’s lack of feeling. I made no apologies, didn’t even attempt to correct her. I simply watched her twisted, angry face, a foot or so away from mine. Was what I was seeing firsthand, directed at me personally, I wondered, the Menendez temper the defense had been describing? My God, I thought, is this what Jose was like when he was displeased?

Despite all, Maria Menendez remains loyal to her grandsons. Sometimes the boys turn to her during the day and manage a little smile, or raise their eyebrows in a sort of greeting.

As the prosecution came to a close, Maria Menendez stopped coming to court. Someone close to the family told me that she does not want to hear her daughter Marta testify about Jose.

In what could become one of the great Hollywood scandals of all time, superstar Michael Jackson is under criminal investigation for allegedly molesting the 13-year-old stepson of a millionaire California businessman at his fairy-tale ranch, Neverland. The boy reportedly told his therapist that Jackson had fondled him. His natural father, a Beverly Hills dentist, ordered his ex-wife to keep the boy away from the pop star. A private investigator working for Jackson claimed that the police investigation was the result of “an extortion gone awry,” after Jackson refused to pay $20 million to an unidentified woman for her silence. Jackson, on tour in Thailand, has denied any guilt, saying, “I am horrified by these allegations.”

Craig Cignarelli looked, acted, and seemed like a rich Beverly Hills kid, although he was from Calabasas, an upper-middle-class suburb in the northwestern part of the San Fernando Valley, where the Menendez family had lived before a pair of burglaries committed by their sons drove them to move virtually overnight to Beverly Hills. At the time of the killings, Cignarelli’s father was a prominent television executive at one of the major film studios. On the two days Craig Cignarelli testified in court, he showed up with two young, pretty girls in miniskirts, who giggled a lot, causing Leslie Abramson to complain to the judge about them.

Erik turns out to have been quite a confessor, although his confessions tend to vary in detail. His first confession, before the confession to Dr. Oziel, was to his onetime best friend Craig Cignarelli. A year before Jose and Kitty Menendez were killed, Erik and Craig wrote a screenplay called Friends, about a rich boy who sees his father’s will and then goes upstairs and murders his parents. Judge Weisberg did not allow the screenplay itself to be introduced as evidence at the trial, but certainly the screenplay seemed to be the genesis of the crimes that were to follow. Erik’s confession to Craig took place 12 days after the bloody shootings, in the house on North Elm Drive. Also in the house at the time was a second computer expert, brought in to search for Jose’s last will, in which some of his money had supposedly been left to people other than his sons. Cignarelli said on the stand that Erik had asked him, “Do you want to know how it happened?” Cignarelli said yes.

“He said he was coming home from a movie and that he was going inside to get his ID, a fake ID, to go out to the bars.… He said that he went back outside and his brother was standing there with two shotguns and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And they walked inside and Lyle was standing—or Erik went up to the door on the left, which was slightly open.… Lyle went up and put his shoulder against the door on the right. And Erik said he looked in, saw his parents sitting on the couch. And Lyle swung open the door and shot his father and looked at Erik and said, ‘Shoot Mom.’ And Erik said he shot his mom and she was standing up yelling.… That was it. We just went on with the conversation after that.” Then they played chess in the living room.

“You didn’t ask Erik, ‘Why did you do it?’ did you?” asked Leslie Abramson on cross.

“No,” replied Cignarelli.

Later, when the police arrived at the Cignarellis’ house in Calabasas and told Craig he was a suspect, he repeated to them what Erik had told them.

“You told the officers on November 17 that what Erik told you was ‘Lyle was to shoot my dad, and I was supposed to shoot my mother.… We went into the room and Lyle and pointed the gun and shot him. He then went over and shot him in the head.… I was unable to shoot my mom, and she tried to get away.… Lyle shot her, too.… After it looked like my mother was dead, I shot her twice with my gun.’ ”

Craig Cignarelli agreed to wear a body wire when he next saw his best friend, and see if he could get him to tell more. They met at Gladstones, a well-known fish restaurant near the beach.

“You were willing to help the police get your best friend arrested, right?” asked Abramson, her voice filled with contempt.

“That’s correct.”

The police put a wire under his shirt, and he was given a calculator with a wire in it to place on the table as a backup listening device. But the wires were a bust. That night Erik had a different story. He said, in effect, that he shouldn’t have said what he said before. He told Craig that he and Lyle didn’t kill their parents.

At one point, Abramson’s voice turned mean. “So you’re putting your story together to match when the computer person came up.”

Cignarelli replied, “I’m not putting my story together. You can twist my story. I’m just telling the truth.”

Another time, her voice filled with disdain, Abramson said, “Do you like to be the center of attention at parties, among friends? … In fact, you got dressed up today to be on-camera.”

In fact, Cignarelli had asked several times not to be on TV. Handsome, sure of himself, someone who enjoys mind games and is a good strategist in chess, he seemed almost to enjoy his cross-examination by Abramson. He was good at sparring with her, and she never threw him.

The billionaire oil-and-real-estate magnate Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara, cut short their annual South of France sojourn at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes after having been robbed at gunpoint in their limousine of $12 million in jewels and a lot of cash. Despite reports to the contrary, Barbara Davis’s friends tell me that nothing has been recovered except a very large solitaire-diamond ring. The Davises are said to be no longer enchanted with France. When they walked into Spago for the first time after the holdup, they were greeted in French by Bernard, the maître d’ (who has since left to start his own restaurant). “Don’t speak to me in French!” Barbara Davis is said to have cried. “I don’t want to hear French again. And I don’t ever want to eat French-fried potatoes, or French toast.”

Leslie Abramson, who in private conversations uses the word “fuck” a lot, is best described by a number of other f-words: flamboyant, feisty, formidable, fascinating, and occasionally, very funny. She is also, occasionally, truly frightening. I would rather walk through fire than be cross-examined by her. On the other hand, in the unlikely circumstance that I ever committed a murder or two, my first call would be to Leslie Abramson.

So far she has saved 12 people from death row. Several years ago in Los Angeles, she represented a Pakistani doctor who was accused of strangling his 11-year-old son and cutting him up into 200 pieces. In what must be considered a landmark case, Abramson got the doctor acquitted. She had only to establish a reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind, and she did exactly that. Later she sued the doctor, because, she claimed, he had paid her only a portion of the fee they had agreed on, and the case was settled.

She is well-known for establishing close relationships with her clients, almost all of whom are charged with murder. When I was writing my articles about the Menendez brothers three years ago, she described them to me as “adorable.” Apparently, she still thinks they are. She giggles with Erik and is very touchy-feely with him; she is constantly patting him on the back, or picking a piece of lint off his shirt, or straightening his collar. Some have interpreted this behavior as flirtatious, others as maternal.

She changes moods, sometimes from one sentence to the next. In courthouse encounters she is alternatively friendly and hostile, and totally unpredictable. Socially, she moves about L.A. not just in legal circles but also with some of the art, film, and literary crowds. People I know who have dined with her say she is a highly entertaining guest at dinner parties.

In the courtroom, she plays to the house, to the camera, to members of the Menendez family, and to the juries. She strikes poses. She mugs. She rolls her eyes in exasperation. Her voice can be mean, argumentative, sarcastic, withering. She also interrupts testimony, but she has met her match in Judge Stanley M. Weisberg. Weisberg, who presided at the first Rodney King trial, is in total command of his courtroom, and no amount of histrionics ever sways his rulings. At one point, Judge Weisberg leaned forward and said to Abramson, “It is the custom of this court, when counsel wishes to be heard, to raise you hand and ask, ‘May I be heard, Your Honor?’ ” He emphasized the last words, and Abramson apologized.

“I’m sorry,” said Abramson, but her apology did not seem to be heartfelt—merely the right words for the court record.

“That would indicate to me that you were disapproving of my ruling, which you have a right to do. But if you do that and display that to the jury, that is your comment on my ruling to the jury, and if you do that again, I’m going to hold you in contempt.”

Over and over Abramson insisted that the word “murder” not be used in the courtroom, because she was claiming self-defense for the brothers. However, Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor, insisted on using the word, and eventually Judge Weisberg overruled Abramson’s objection to its use.

During Abramon’s cross-examination of Dr. Oziel, Judge Weisberg admonished her so strongly that a less resolute lawyer would have left the courtroom in tears. Not Abramson.

She jokingly pretends to an indifference about the trial. “I’m so bored with this,” she said while sitting in a spectator seat chatting with the media one day. “I do it all day in court. I go home and watch it on TV. Then the next morning I read about it in the paper. Everywhere I go, that’s all people ask me about. This has been going on for three years. It gets so boring.” It was obvious that she did not mean it was boring at all. It is what she loves doing.

She is never without a backup plan, or an answer. One day when we were all in the corridor, the lawyers were told that they could go into the courtroom, but the media would have to wait. Walking in, she said to me playfully, “I’d let you in with me if you were a friend.”

I answered, trying to match her tone, “What do you mean? I gave you a big plug on TV this morning.”

She turned around, looked at me, and said scathingly, “I don’t need a plug.”

Several of the reporters on the Menendez trial also covered the Rodney King trials. The second King jury, who were together for so long, just held their first get-together. Word was that they were upset with the lenient sentence of two and a half years given to Officers Koon and Powell. A lot of people in the city were upset, too. However, the riots so many people feared might be sparked by the sentencing did not occur. Now the members of the ethnically mixed jury in the Reginald Denny trial have been seated. Reginald Denny is the white man who was pulled out of his truck during the L.A. riots and nearly beaten to death. Whatever the verdict is in this case, there is enormous fear that trouble in the streets could come again.

The defense attorneys fought long and hard to keep the grisly crime-scene and autopsy photographs from being shown to the jury, saying that they were too gruesome and gory, more prejudicial than probative. The 39-year-old Wellesley-educated prosecutor, Pamela Bozanich, responded strongly, “Those who have committed crimes like these, it ill behooves them to complain of the carnage they leave.”

Judge Weisberg ruled in favor of the prosecution. Only five pictures of the actual murder scene—of the dead bodies covered with blood in the family room—were shown. The others were autopsy pictures of the wounds, with most of the blood, guts, and “matter” washed away.

A contact wound is one inflicted when the muzzle of the gun is placed against the head, face, or body as it is fired. In Los Angeles police parlance, these wounds are called “rat holes.” Jose Menendez’s contact wound was to the back of the head. It was the last of five shots fired into him.

The most gruesome picture was of Kitty Menendez’s dead face. Her contact wound was on her cheek. One eye and part of her nose were missing. However, her other eye was open and staring out. You could not help but think she was watching her son deliver the coup de grâce. Both juries were riveted. There was total silence in the courtroom.

Erik Menendez’s already pale face was sick-white during the showing of the photographs. Mostly he kept his head down as they were displayed on two bulletin boards. Occasionally he would raise his head, grab a quick look, then lower his eyes again. Throughout the grim proceedings, Abramson kept patting him on the back with comforting strokes, as if he were the mourner, rather than killer, of his parents.

On July 30, Army Archerd, the venerable columnist of Daily Variety, broke the news that Joyce Haber had died, scooping even the Los Angeles Times, for which Haber once wrote a gossip column. Haber was regarded as one of Hollywood’s most powerful women, the successor to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, but she wore out her welcome in town, became despised, and was banished to total obscurity after she lost her job at the Times. She died forsaken and forgotten at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Her single visitor in the last week of her life was her former hairdresser. A Beverly Hills doctor said about her, “The only person I ever knew who took more pills than Joyce was Judy Garland.”

A therapist is like a priest or minister in a sense that people come in and confess. I, and any therapist, carries with him or with her at all times hundreds or thousands of people’s secrets. And it is a sacred obligation to preserve those secrets, unless the law mandates that one does otherwise.

ABRAMSON: Is it a basic tenet of therapeutic treatment that patients be told that what they tell their psychologists are like what they tell their priests—confidential?

OZIEL: No. I wouldn’t ever make the analogy that what patients tell their psychotherapist is the equivalent of what they tell their priest.

Possibly the mast fateful moment in this story was when Kitty Menendez’s psychologist, Dr. Les Sommerfield, recommended Dr. L. Jerome Oziel as a therapist for her sons. At the time, the Menendez family was living in one house, in Calabasas, while rebuilding a bigger, grander one nearby. In 1988 the Menendez brothers became involved in a burglary and a grand theft. These burglaries were not inconsequential; they involved money, property, and some serious jewelry, in the $100,000 range, taken from the safes in neighbors’ houses. One of Erik’s friends, who had discovered the combination to the safe of a friend’s father, participated in the first heist. That friend, who was cut out of the second burglary, turned them in. Jose Menendez berated his sons, although not for the reason one would assume. He berated them for getting caught. Jose Menendez was a take-charge kind of guy, and once again he took charge. The jewels were returned. The money was repaid. At the time, Lyle was about to go to Princeton. It had been the fondest wish of Jose’s life to have his son accepted at that Ivy League university. He was always ashamed that he had gone to Queens College, in Flushing, New York, since most of his business associates were from Ivy League schools. So that there would be no black mark against Lyle that might affect his acceptance, Jose decided that Erik, who was under-age at the time, would take the fall for both boys. In a deal worked out by their lawyer, Erik got probation and compulsory counseling. Lyle did attend Princeton, but he was suspended after one term for cheating in Psychology 101. His father insisted that he continue to live in Princeton so that Jose would not have to admit to his business colleagues that his son no longer attended the university.

The name Oziel (pronounced O-zeel) sounds like a name out of Dickens or Trollope, where the sound of the name depicts the character of the character. Had the Menendezes bothered to check up on Oziel rather than just accepting the recommendation of Dr. Sommerfield, they would have found that he was on a five-year probation at the time for unethical conduct. One of his patients had been unable to pay his bill, and said that at Oziel’s suggestion he had made a verbal contract to work off the bill by doing more than 300 hours of manual work on the Oziel family’s house and grounds. Such an arrangement is called a dual relationship, and, because of the potential for conflict of interest, it is frowned upon by the American Psychological Association.

When a rich boy steals, it is not because he needs money to eat, or because he wants to buy something that his family cannot afford. The Menendez boys had everything, including their own cars, the use of their parents’ credit cards, private tennis lessons—whatever. There were more deep-rooted problems in that family, which needed to be worked on. But Dr. Oziel requested that Erik sign waivers of the confidentiality agreement between patient and doctor so that the doctor could share what he learned with Jose and Kitty. If a boy is being psychologically or physically molested by his father, as the defense is claiming, it is very unlikely that he would discuss it with a therapist if he knew that what he said was being passed on to his parents. Many doctors would not have agreed to such a suggestion, but Jose was obviously the kind of man who would have kept on going until he found one who would. In any case, Oziel agreed.

Before Oziel took the stand, Leslie Abramson announced in a majestic voice to the court that she intended to discredit him “in any area known to man and God.” And she has gone far in doing that. Very few people sitting in the courtroom have ever witnessed more flagrant distortions that they have heard here. One night after court, I sat in my room at the Chateau Marmont and rewatched on television what I had seen in court that day. Sitting with me was Judalon Smyth, who seems to know everything there is to know about Oziel. Smyth and another woman, Alex Koury, have filed a complaint against him, which resulted in a recommendation by the attorney general of the state of California that his license to practice be revoked or suspended. The attorney general’s charge reads:

This case involves the respondent, a psychologist, who engaged in sexual, social, and business relationships with two patients while he and the patients had a psychologist/patient relationship. In addition, the respondent disclosed professional confidences to one of the patients, furnished controlled substances without proper medical authorization or supervision to both patients, and forged the name of a physician in a letter.

As Symth watched Oziel answer the lawyers’ questions, she kept saying under her breath, “A lie … A lie … A lie.”

Oziel had never admitted that Judalon Smyth was in his office on either of the days the Menendez brothers confessed, whereas she has claimed from the day she went to the Beverly Hills police that she was listening on the other side of his office door. After that, Smyth began saving messages Oziel left on her answering machine and taping his telephone calls to her. The defense played a tape on which Oziel says to Smyth, “You were there.” When confronted by Michael Burt with the evidence that Smyth had been in his office on November 2, Oziel replied, “I don’t believe I testified under oath.” “That about sums up Oziel,” said Smyth, watching the moment later on television.

As a witness for the prosecution, Oziel presented himself well. “I was of the firm belief that Erik and Lyle were planning to murder me,” he said to justify the long silence he maintained following the brothers’ confession to him. In describing that confession, he said that Erik was extremely agitated and depressed on the day he came to see him. He said he felt alienated over his parents’ deaths. He felt suicidal. He saw images of the scenes of his parents’ deaths. He said he wanted to take a walk and tell the doctor something which he didn’t want to tell him in the office. They sat on a bench in a Beverly Hills park. Erik told him that Jose was a great man, and that he wanted to write a book about him. Then they headed back to the office. Before entering the front door of the building, Erik leaned against a parking meter and said, “We did it.” Back inside, Erik described in “pretty elaborate detail” what had happened. Oziel said that Erik told him the plan began when he saw a BBC program on television in which a person killed his father. He called Lyle into the room and told him to watch. He said that his father had been tyrannical, dominating, and controlling, with standards he couldn’t possibly meet, and that he was very damaging to their mother also. He said the reason the mother was killed was that they couldn’t figure out a way of killing the father without killing her. She would have been a witness. She couldn’t have lived without the father. She was unhappy. Erik felt the need to commit the murders quickly, because he felt he would lose the emotional state he was in, but Lyle wanted to wait and plan things out more. Erik told about buying the shotguns. He told about the stolen ID. He said he entered the room first and surprised the parents. He was shooting at the father. Lyle followed and finished off the job. Oziel said he was confused about who shot which parent. Both brothers fired the shotguns. Erik said his father said something like, “No, no, no.” He turned away and was shot as he said that. The mother was shot and fell to the floor. Then the father died, but the mother wasn’t dead yet. The boys went outside and got more cartridges and reloaded the shotguns. Their mother was moaning and trying to crawl. Lyle finished her off.

Leslie Abramson was true to her promise of discrediting Oziel. She has always loathed him. At a news conference I attended three years ago, she characterized him as a gossip, a liar, “less than credible.” Now she, for Erik, and then Michael Burt, for Kyle, conducted a cross-examination guaranteed to wreck the psychologist’s already nearly wrecked career. They made him out to be not only a liar but also a philanderer and a cheat. They suggested that he had made the tapes for extortionist purposes and had threatened their clients with them. They showed that he billed the Menendez brothers for an extraordinary number of hours. Although the word “blackmail” was never mentioned, it was certainly implied.

But the examination of the doctor went on too long. Oziel was on the stand for six days. It became a trial within a trial. It was a diversionary tactic, taking attention away from what the case is all about: murder. Outside the courtroom, prosecutor Pamela Bozanich mocked the defense tactic as “a cheap edition of Divorce Court.” The Menendez brothers were nearly forgotten, although at times Lyle shook his head in disbelief at what the therapist was saying, and several times Erik turned around to his Aunt Marta and shook his head. Watching them, I wondered if these were planned moves, to get a reaction from the juries.

Marta Cano grinned broadly at the discomfort of Dr. Oziel throughout Abramson’s cross-examination, as if she were watching a sitcom instead of her nephews’ trial for the murder of her brother, an alleged child molester, and sister-in-law. At one point she was reprimanded by Judge Weisberg, who had allowed her to sit in the courtroom even though she was to be a witness for the defense.

Abramson is famous for being able to break down witnesses—make them cry, contradict themselves, lose their temper and scream at her. Although Dr. Oziel contradicted himself many times, he did not break down. He remained cool, assertive, in control of himself. Instead, it was Leslie Abramson who became intensely angry and screamed. She had to call for a brief recess to calm down. For his part, Michael Burt conducted the cross-examination in a quiet but lethal manner, in total contrast to Leslie Abramson’s histrionics. When Oziel finally left the stand, there was a general sense of “Let’s get back to what we’re here for.” Oziel’s time will come, in another court, for another case.

Former studio head and producer Robert Evans, who cannot stay out of trouble, is having a triple whammy this summer. Fresh on the heels of his highly publicized comeback film, Sliver, which bombed miserably, his name has surfaced in the press, along with that of his co-producer, Bill MacDonald, the maybe-maybe-not fiancé of Sharon Stone, in a lawsuit linking Evans and MacDonald to an alleged scheme to defraud private investors of $6 million. Evans and McDonald have both denied any wrongdoing. But Evans’s name has also been regularly linked to the Heidi Fleiss sex scandal, although he is not connected with the studio that has allegedly charged hooker and drug costs to its development fund.

On the day before the boys killed their parents, the Menendez family went on a shark-fishing expedition on a chartered boat called Motion Picture Marine. The captain of the boat testified that “there was not much interaction going on” between the parents and sons. The boys stayed together in the front of the boat, far away from their parents, even though they got soaked and cold. Leslie Abramson claimed to the media during a lunch break—and her remarks appeared on the local evening news—that the boys were afraid to go on the boat, because they thought their parents were going to kill them. To me, it seems highly unlikely that a smart man like Jose Menendez would plan to kill his sons on a fishing trip of this sort, in the presence of the captain, the captain’s girlfriend, and a deckhand. A more compelling explanation for the non-communication was the fact that the boys, their plans drawn up, had gone to San Diego the day before to buy the guns for the massacre they were to commit the next day, which was Sunday, the maid’s day off.

Tina Sinatra, the daughter of Frank Sinatra, took out a restraining order on her former lover, the actor James Farentino, last spring, after what had been described as a turbulent and violent relationship came to an end. She claims now that Farentino continues to stalk her and makes her life miserable. Hard Copy has had a field day with the story. Tina’s girlfriends have additional stories to tell. She wants him to be kept away from her. He has been charged with violating the restraining order. A court case is upcoming.

In a startling courtroom session on August 13, just before the prosecution rested and with the juries not present, Lester Kuriyama, the quiet but extremely effective co-prosecutor, solved the mystery of the BBC film that Oziel said Erik had told him inspired the killings. The assumption had always been that it was a British film that had played on public television. For almost a year, the police and prosecutors, working with the BBC and Scotland Yard, had tried to track down the film, to no avail. The previous weekend, Kuriyama and his wife had gone with their six-year-old daughter to a video store, where they selected The Addams Family to rent. As Kuriyama’s wife reached for the film, she happened to notice on the shelf below a made-for-television film called Billionaire Boys Club. B.B.C. The Kuriyamas took that film home as well. The resemblances between the true-crime story on the video and the Menendez slayings were uncanny. It soon became clear that the carefully thought-out plot of the Menendez brothers was totally copycat, and totally in keeping with the traditions of their cheat-lie-steal-but-win family. Billionaire Boys Club had played in rerun on NBC three weeks before the brothers killed their parents. The plot of that film revolves around a group of rich Beverly Hills boys who murder two people, including the father of one of them. In the film, the central character talks about committing the perfect murder. Dr. Oziel had said that the boys also talked about having committed a perfect murder, after having failed to perform to perfection in the Calabasas thefts. His father would have been proud of him, Lyle said, according to Oziel. In the film, one of the victims was shot in the back of the head. So was Jose Menendez. In the film the alibi was that the killer was at the movies. The brothers claimed to have gone to see License to Kill, but because it was sold out they had gone to see Batman again. The second victim in the film had political enemies. Erik suggested that Castro might have sent someone to kill his father, who was Cuban. Because the father in the film was worth $30 million, the boys decided to kill him. The boy in the film drove a Jeep. Erik bought a Jeep with the first payment he received from Jose’s insurance policy. The boy in the film wore a Rolex watch. Four days after the Menendez brothers shot their parents, they both bought Rolexes. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the Billionaires Boys Club video is being released by Live Entertainment.

Lester Kuriyama sought unsuccessfully to be allowed to show the film to the juries. Leslie Abramson fought like a tiger to keep the jury from seeing it. Judge Weisberg, for all his sternness, is occasionally very funny. “Are you going to sell popcorn?” he asked Kuriyama. He nixed the showing of the film, but ruled that Kuriyama could tell the jurors that a movie had been aired on NBC on July 30 and 31, 1989, which involved a son who kills his father, and that the words of the title began with the letters BBC.

Leslie Abramson said she had never seen the movie, yet several weeks earlier, when Craig Cignarelli had said the words “billionaire boys’ club” on the stand, she had jumped to her feet and shouted, “Your Honor, I would object. Move to strike and ask to approach.” Judge Weisberg responded: “All right. The objection is sustained. The answer is stricken, and the jury’s admonished to disregard it.”

Why are all these relations here in the courtroom supporting the boys who killed their son, or brother, or sister? Several of them will take the stand for the defense. A reporter who met one of the aunts in the ladies’ room told me she said, “When you know what the truth is, you will understand.” Is there more we don’t know? Is there a surprise yet to come from the ever resourceful Leslie Abramson, who said to Alan Abrahamson of the Los Angeles Times after the prosecution rested, “Now we start talking about what really happened”? Will she present the final confrontation of parents and sons in the family room in order to prove that the sons killed in self-defense?

The former girlfriend of a prisoner who lived in the cell next to Erik’s at the Los Angeles County Jail for four and a half months told me that her boyfriend told her, “He reminded me of a caged animal. He ran up and down the halls. Other times he would be completely withdrawn. Or manic. He didn’t say he hadn’t done it. Or had. He only said, ‘We’re going to prevail in court.’ ”

For even one of the brothers to prevail, they may have to turn against each other in the defense case ahead, and isn’t that perhaps why this trial has been set up from the beginning with two juries? I wonder.

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.

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